Critical and Analytical Listening:
The Orchestration of Production

This seminar, taught by seven-time National Emmy winner and Bad Animals co-owner Tom McGurk, trained our ears to pick apart and identify the individual production elements of a recording - such as reverb and delay times, equalized frequencies, and panning degrees - in the same manner that we would analyze the arrangement of an orchestral piece.

As a source material, the class used Dr. William Moylan's The Art of Recording: the Creative Resources of Music Production and Audio (Kluwer Academic Publishers), as well as Dave Moulton's Golden Ears CD series.

Dr. Moylan's text is used as the basis for Critical Listening courses at such schools as Emerson College, and he describes his concept as "a course that develops listening skills to identify and understand qualities of sound that are unique to or of significance to recordings; skills are developed in frequency estimation, frequency band recognition, amplitude changes, dynamic contours, and time judgments, leading to advanced perceptions in recognizing specific qualities of timbres and of spatial relationships. The course uses music recordings as source materials, students analyze the recordings to extract specific information on one or more of these areas (such as musical balance, distance location, etc.)"

Tom McGurk is a composer, sound designer, Bad Animals co-owner and seven-time National Emmy winner who has done work for Bill Nye the Science Guy, Disney's Epcot Center, the Winter Olympics, KCTS, and Humongous Entertainment.

General Public:	$10
SCA Associate Members:	$5
SCA Full Members:	No Charge

2001 Past Events